During the 1920s, the dominant conception was that the peasants
were the ruling class in Russia. Later, approximately in the mid-1930s, the
thesis of “State Capitalism”, originally conceived by Rühle in 1920 (cf. Chapter
16), prevailed within the GIKH. The Theses on Bolshevism (1934) analyzed
the entire process which resulted in Stalinist Russia: it was, more or less,
similar to the idea expressed in our introduction to Trotsky’s Report of the
Siberian Delegation. Pannekoek was the first to bring this conception to
Northwest Europe, with his article “De Arbeiders het Parlament en het
Communisme” (Rätekorrespondenz). He applied it in his Lenin and
Philosophy.

Another group, which was close to Mattick, and which published
De Arbeidersraad, did not want to hear anything of “State Capitalism” and
“State Socialism”, and still considered the Bolshevik Party to be a “peasant
party”, even after collectivization: cf. Volume II, No. 2, February 1936.

A text written by a French worker who had worked in Russia had a
great deal of influence on the Dutch Left in relation to this particular issue:
Ce qu’est devenue la Révolution russe, by Yvon, published in Paris in 1937.

Like the Italian Left, the German Left of that time had the merit
of having denounced democratic anti-fascism and anti-Nazism as the “worst
products of fascism” (Bordiga), as well as of never having resorted to using the
political arguments of Nazism as the KPD had in the early 1930s, and of never
having offered its collaboration to Mussolini as the Italian Communist Party had
at the end of the 1930s.

Under Nazism, the position of the German Left was to contribute
to the formation of communist workers groups on the same basis as in the early
1920s, but under conditions of clandestinity: “No ‘special’ communist program
for Germany” (cf. Masses, No. 1). Its ideological position would evolve.
Until 1933 it did not believe that Nazism would be successful. When Hitler took
power, the small publications which were still being published predicted his
rapid downfall: the policy of setting the unemployed to work on various
“unproductive” projects would not prevent a new round of inflation and the
aggravation of the deteriorating living conditions of the working class, which
would go on the offensive. They also criticized the false democratic
alternatives. When, after the passage of a few years, Nazism was
well-established, and the situation of the workers had improved, making Hitler
as popular among them as among the other social classes, the leftists were the
first to admit this fact and to try to explain it. They interpreted the behavior
of the German proletarians as the result of what they had been taught in the old
workers movement (Lassalle and social democracy) which had always said that the
State is the providence of all of society: one must expect everything from State
measures and nothing from spontaneous actions (cf. Spartacus, published
by a working group of revolutionary workers in Amsterdam, No. 3, 1936 or 1937).
Pannekoek would add his critique of the Bolshevik cult of the party and its
leaders: cf. The Workers Councils, quoted by F. Kool, p. 570.

At this stage, the result was an attitude of non-participation,
of choosing neither side; in the Second World War, Rühle declared in 1939,
fascism-nazism-stalinism would be victorious because they corresponded to the
general tendency of capitalism towards State Capitalism. It was useless to
defend the democracies; the only real alternative to fascism was the proletarian
revolution. “The struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against
Bolshevism”: this thesis was also shared by Mattick and, in general, by all the
leftists (cf. our commentary, Chapter 17).

There is little material concerning World War Two (in comparison
with the Italian Left), and nothing we are aware of, except the articles by
Korsch reproduced in Marxism and Counterrevolution, Chapter XII.

It would be impossible to summarize the theses and debates
on this issue. For the supporters of the death crisis thesis, we cite:
“Wereldcrisis, wereldrevolutie”,[7]De Arbeidersraad, Year 1, No. 8,
August 1935, and an article by Mattick in Rätekorrespondenz, No. 4, 1934,
a response to a previous article by Pannekoek. This tendency, after having
returned to Luxemburg’s conceptions in the 1920s, saw its concept of the death
crisis confirmed by the social democratic economist H. Grossmann, who published
Das Akkumulations und zusammenbruchs gesetz des Kapitalistischen systems in
1929 (reprinted by Verlag Neue Kritik, Frankfort, 1967). Pannekoek criticized
Grossmann in the article we reproduce below (cf. Chapter XII of C. Brendel’s
book on Pannekoek).

The supplement to the first issue of ICO published the
translation of a text from 1935 (Rätekorrespondenz, Nos. 10-11): “Average
social labor time, basis for communist production and distribution”, which
summarizes the Grundprinzipien des Kommunistischen Produktion und Verteilung,
reprinted by Rüdiger-Blankertz Verlag, West Berlin. All subsequent texts on this
subject (Mattick, Pannekoek’s Workers Councils) would accept this idea as
their basis.

Various texts show that the left (after the 1930s) did not
theorize its break with democracy, “freedom”, etc., and that its rejection of
the dictatorship of the proletariat was not just a matter of words: “Communism
and Intellectual Freedom”, Radencommunisme, Year 1, No. 12, August 1939,
and “Arbeiders-demokratie in de bedrijven”[8] by C. Meijer, in the same journal, in
1944 or 1945. This culminated in The Workers Councils.

Most of the texts mentioned in this bibliography cannot be found
“for sale”, but can be consulted or photocopied at the International Institute
for Social History, 262-266 Herengracht, Amsterdam.